The United States of America contains a vast, nation-wide network of terrorist groups, armed to the teeth, conspiring to overthrow the federal government. These groups operate mostly in the shadows, a semi-legal world where they acquire the latest arms, organise secret cells, carry out operations to destabilise the government and undermine their authority, and rely on a reservoir of latent support in the communities they inhabit. These groups are fascinated by guns, absorbed by doctrines of supremacism that regard their community as elevated over the majority of the population, and are abusing the civil liberties and general tolerance of the wider community to spout their vitriol through various social and electronic media channels.

Oh and by the way, the terrorist groups which pose the greatest threat to the United States are not Muslim – they are white.

Professor Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, wrote a comment piece on his blog entitled ‘Top 3 White Terrorist Attacks in America this week’. In this article, he pointed out that the American white supremacist Right, with its fixation on ‘big government’ and obsession with guns and arms, poses a mortal threat to the federal government. Wrapping itself in the mantle of constitutional patriotism and portraying its fight against ‘tyranny’, the American far right has built up its strength, incorporating people disaffected with the system. Most of the victims of America’s violent ultra-right are civilians, their deaths rationalised away by the right wing’s supporters as the unfortunate casualties of a war against big government tyranny. As Professor Cole explained in his article;

Although their attacks are ideological, directed at civilian victims and violent, they are seldom categorized as ‘terrorists.’ Rather what they do is “mass shootings.” In the meantime, plots hatched by Muslims in the US during the past few years appear almost always to be a form of entrapment by the FBI.

Only a few months ago, in April 2014, a white supremacist gunman and organiser of several racist groups, targeted residents of the Jewish Community Centre in Kansas. The killer, Frazier Glenn Miller, was known to authorities as a violent anti-Semite with a history of espousing white supremacist views and targeting ethnic minorities. Miller continued his activities in a climate of racial hatred and vitriol, a climate created and abetted by mainstream media outlets, particularly those associated with the Republican party and right wing ideology. Media corporations operated by yellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Fox Cable News, CNN, and other media outlets, propound virulent hate speech that promotes a political discourse of hatred against ethnic minorities, the latest targets being the Arab and Islamic communities.

Miller’s outburst did not occur in isolation. Back in 2012, white supremacist and ‘citizen patriot’ gunman Wade Michael Page walked into a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and killed six people, critically wounding three. He thought he was attacking Muslims. Page was also far from a ‘lone nut’. He was a vocal neo-Nazi, operating in white supremacist circles, and espoused hateful ideology by participating in bands that are categorised as ‘white power music’. Significantly, Page was an army veteran, and he brought his military training and knowledge into the service of white racist extremism. He transformed into a violent racist while serving in the army, the latter providing a milieu in which white racist ultra-rightist ‘patriotism’ could flourish.

These are not isolated incidents. The most recent example of white supremacist terrorism, given coverage in the corporate media, was the shooting of police officers in Las Vegas in June 2014 by Jared Miller and his wife, Amanda Woodruff Miller. The latter were steeped in white supremacist, ultra-right wing ‘patriotic’ ideology, blamed their setbacks in life on a tyrannical American government, and expressed their hopes of striking back through an obsession with guns. The two shooters began their terroristic rampage by killing two police officers, stripping the corpses of their weapons, and then covered the bodies with the Gadsden flag, a historical flag used during the American independence wars, featuring a coiled rattlesnake poised to strike with the words ‘Don’t tread on me.’

The Miller couple had long spoken of their alienation from the ‘system’, their lack of access to adequate health care, their contempt for the federal government, and their inability to make ends meet in tough economic times. From this wellspring of resentment, emerged a racial hatred, a fascination with guns, all cloaked in the ‘patriotic’ sentiments of ‘defending the constitution’ as designed by the fathers of American independence. Wrapping up anti-ethnic hysteria in the American flag is nothing new; it is a standard theme of the Tea Party ultra-right fanatics .

As the capitalist economic crisis worsens, wages stagnate while the pay of CEOs continue to increase, more people are declining into poverty, and becoming desperate. As this desperation takes hold, they are looking for ways to strike back. The Millers are just one couple among millions who had been pushed down into penurious circumstances. They represent the kind of people ripe for recruitment into white-supremacist, ultra-right wing militia groups that give vent to simmering hatreds. As the gulf between rich and poor widens, hope in the future of the current society is lost. The demise of hope contributes to a growth in crime, social disorder, and the appeal of escapist cults. The latter venerate martyrdom for a cause as a way to provide a new meaning to life. Sacrifice for a cause is very noble – but that cause must target the centres of economic and political power, not deflect hatred onto other ethnic and dispossessed minorities.

In a thoughtful and disturbing article for The Daily Beast online news web site, Dean Obeidallah wrote that the incidence of right wing terrorism is very real, frightening, and large in scope. However, the American political establishment, mainly the right wing Republican faction, refuses to see the problem for what it is. Obeidallah lists the most egregious examples of ultra-right terrorism in the United States over the last few years, and documents the reaction of the conservative media and political establishment in either ignoring the problem, or responding with sympathetic voices. In most cases, the American corporate media has enabled such ultra-right extremism to flourish. As Obeidallah explained, “The actual reason Republicans won’t investigate right-wing extremists is that it would not only anger their base, it would actually indict some parts of it.”

This is not the first, nor the last time, that the American Right has willfully ignored, and sometimes aided, the rise of violent white-supremacist extremism. The Cliven Bundy standoff provides an instructive example of how American politics is infected with the malaise of white, gun-friendly extremism. A rebellious rancher, Bundy has refused to pay taxes to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for the land on which his cattle grazes. Bundy claims it is his right to refuse to pay taxes – very true, but he also parasitically using federal land that thousands of other ranchers use in Nevada. He has scrounged off this land for free, making a profit for many years, and defeating numerous lawsuits against him. When he was confronted by BLM personnel, his case became a cause celebre among far-right militias. Here was a rancher, standing up to a tyrannical federal government. His case was taken up by right wing media outlets, Fox news, CNN, as well as Tea Party supporters and far-right libertarian politicians. But then Bundy opened his mouth and expounded his views. He is of the opinion that African Americans should be returned to slavery, that they never had it so good since the days of slave-owning, and that the sooner the black Americans were returned to a slave-owning system, the better.

The conservative politicians and media outlets then made awkward reversals and distanced themselves from Bundy. While the ravings of an out-of-touch racist scrounger like Bundy can be dismissed, it is harder to dismiss the reaction of mainstream politicians and pundits. Bundy became a lightning rod, attracting the ultra-right white supremacists from around the country, providing a beacon of support, and was enabled in his standoff because of the support he has for his racist views. The political and media establishment provided the oxygen for the Bundyite views to spread. As Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report commented in her article;

Bundy is no outlier in any of the opinions he holds. There are millions of Americans who would take up arms to kill mostly because they would enjoy it. They might defend their actions with an appeal to patriotism or a sage brush rebellion or doomsday prepping or whatever rationale would be most convenient, but the bottom line is that they would like to get away with killing as many people as possible.

Kimberley examined the undercurrent of racism that underpinned the gathering of ultra-right extremists at the Bundy standoff:

Bundy is also not alone in seeing chattel slavery as being worthy of nostalgia. It is not a coincidence that gun and slavery lovers so often find common cause. The two go together and the Second Amendment is directly tied to the granting of police force status to every white person in the country in the days of slavery. Bundy’s popularity is deep and dangerous and he is no less popular now in some circles than he was before he made his remarks. Most racists know how to filter their thoughts in polite society. But Bundy is an ignorant man with no clue about niceties and said what was on his and others’ minds. It doesn’t matter that Rand Paul and Fox News back tracked from the Bundy love fest. If millions of white Americans were granted their ultimate fantasy, black people would be back in chains on the auction block.

There is even less excuse for the racist diatribes of Donald Sterling, billionaire owner of the LA Clippers, who was caught on tape making racist derogatory remarks about African Americans. The irony of Sterling owning a sporting team in which African Americans are prominent participants was not lost upon the corporate media, countless comedians and talk-show hosts, who all quite rightly made Sterling the object of scorn, ridicule and derision for his repugnant views. But what is startling is that Sterling made his billions as a slumlord, hiring out his sub-standard tenements to African American, Hispanic American and people of other ethnic minorities. Sterling made his views about ethnic minorities quite clear earlier in his career, before he became involved in the professional sports business. For instance, he went on record stating that he did not like to rent his accommodation to Hispanics because they smoke, drink and are lazy, and that African American ‘smell and attract vermin.’

The real tragedy, according to Kevin Blackistone writing in The Guardian newspaper, is not that Sterling made racist comments, scandalous as they are. It is the fact that Sterling’s racism was allowed to go unnoticed and unpunished all these years, even when he entered the business of professional sports and became an owner of an NBA team. Where was the outrage, the denunciations, the ridicule and scorn as Sterling made his way up the corporate ladder?

Sterling’s racism was well known in Los Angeles prior to the taped conversations being revealed but obedience to a rich man protected him from full exposure. In 2008 he was sued by former NBA star and Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor, who claimed a “plantation mentality” permeated the work environment in that organization. Also in 2009 the Sterlings were forced to pay $2.7 million due to discriminatory housing practices against black and Latino tenants in apartment buildings they owned in Los Angeles. It was the largest such judgment paid in a housing case at that time. None of this mattered to the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP, which honored Sterling with a humanitarian of the year award in 2009 and was prepared to give him a lifetime achievement award before the scandal was revealed.

Kimberley asks the obvious question – would African Americans, or Americans from any ethnic minority, be allowed to gather weapons, espouse a hateful ideology, encourage disobedience to the federal government, and form militaristic militias without any reaction from the US law enforcement authorities?

Tackling ultra-right extremism will take a concerted effort to change the deeply dysfunctional and brutalised system that American capitalism has become. The Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing extremism and analysed the political and economic climate that fuels such ultra-right violence, back in 2009. This report was attacked upon its release by the very forces of the corporate media establishment that enabled the Bundys and Sterlings of the world to vent their vitriolic hatred. The rightist purveyors of violence, like Frazier Glenn Miller mentioned above, operate in a political climate that is at least partially sympathetic to their views, and at worst, positive enablers of such violent ultra-right fanaticism. It is interesting to note that Miller’s terrorist attack, while driven by anti-Semitism, claimed the lives of a similar number of victims as the Boston Marathon bombings. (Many more were injured in the Boston bombing however). The Boston Marathon bombing, while reprehensible, received disproportionate media coverage. Miller’s attack, while noted, invited no soul-searching scrutiny.

Since the September 11 2001 attacks and the ‘war on terror’, Islamist groups that advocate a jihadist ideology have become the sole focus of concern. It is true that attacks could happen. Islamist guerrillas, returning from a war zone, could be sufficiently motivated to carry out similar attacks on their home soil. This is a case of circumstantial guilt by association. There are cases of merchant and investment bankers who, travelling overseas, are lured by the promise of easy money engage in illicit and illegal money-laundering activities upon their return to their home country. (And this has happened). Do we stop the activities of transnational financial corporations because some of their executives have turned into drug-money launderers and fraudsters? Given the extent of corporate criminality, perhaps we should.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published an informative article examining the growth of right wing terrorism. The article elaborates upon the rise of the far right in times of economic hardship, how the majority of terrorist attacks in the United States have been committed by groups with an ultra-right, anti-immigrant ideology, far more than groups driven by an al-Qaeda-type mentality, and how many of the most violent groups contain members with backgrounds in the United States military. It appears that service in the US military is serving as an incubator of violent extremism, rather than the preachings of obscure Islamic clerics.

It is appropriate to conclude with the words of Dr Martin Luther King. In 1967, he gave a speech in which he remarked that the United States government is the main purveyor of violence around the world. He toured the cities of Detroit, Chicago, and the ghettos of the North American states, finding grinding poverty, helplessness and demoralisation. He then witnessed the financial exhaustion of the American economy as the military-industrial complex funded wars overseas, particularly in Vietnam. He drew the conclusions that an exhausted, impoverished people, bereft of hope and optimism, resort to desperate and violent means to survive. Some find expression by joining similarly disenchanted groups, focusing their resentments on the most vulnerable. Expressing his hope that a complete revolution of values and ideas occurs in American society, Dr King stated;

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just.”

As the capitalist system lurches from crisis to crisis, and the individual capitalists of the West continue to fund wars of expansion overseas while millions remain mired in poverty, it is time to ask ourselves whether we can continue to live in such a dysfunctional system. We would do well to heed the words of Dr King, because they are still relevant all these years after they were first spoken.

The title above comes from a thoughtful and perceptive article by Margaret Kimberley, writer and activist with Black Agenda Report. Her essay called ‘The Plunder of Detroit and Iraq’ was republished in the Common Dreams online magazine, a nonprofit reader-driven independent news outlet dedicated to building a progressive community, an antidote to the corporate-controlled media. Kimberley accurately points out that disaster capitalism, driven by the imperative of corporate profits, has created and is responsible for the humanitarian catastrophes that we are now witnessing in Detroit and Iraq. Kimberley starts her essay by stating that ‘the ugly face of empire and disaster capitalism is visible all over the world’.

Detroit deindustrialised

Detroit exhibits all the classic signs of a city that has been systematically deindustrialised over many decades. Once the hub of the car industry in America, a city that exemplified the best US labour, industry and technology, Detroit is now a bankrupted city, with urban decay, declining infrastructure, a diminishing population, and a financial system that is preserving its own wealth while leaving the residents to struggle with making ends meet. Dollars and Sense magazine, which publishes articles on economic justice, critiques of the mainstream bourgeois economics and primers on economics for activists, published an extensive analysis of the decline of Detroit back in 2013. The authors of that article correctly note that there were the standard conservative-driven reasons given for the blight of Detroit – greedy unions, incompetent black American politicians, people taking easy loans from the big banks knowing that they could ill-afford repayments. Perhaps all of these are partially valid.

However, the major share of the blame for the deindustrialisation and subsequent decline of Detroit rests on the shoulders of the corporate class, the owners of the large multinational corporations, the large financial institutions that not only systematically withdrew from Detroit and undermined the living and working conditions of the majority of people. The new financial managers of Detroit, led by the emergency manager Kevyn Orr, are deliberately shifting the cost of the financial burden onto the working people. Detroit’s plan of adjustment, introduced by the city’s creditors, involves privatisating the city’s public assets, massive cuts to pensions and health services, the sell-off of the electricity and sewerage systems, and most scandalously of all, selling off the assets of the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the meantime, the residents of Detroit will have to continue living in squalid conditions, recorded in a photo-essay here.

Meanwhile in Iraq

The nation of Iraq lies in tatters, fractured by sectarian divisions enshrined in the post-2003 invasion political establishment. The country underwent terrible destruction as a result of sanctions, and they took their toll on the population. Food, medicines, the necessities of life were denied Iraqis as they struggled to overcome the destitution brought on by crippling sanctions. For instance, water purification became virtually impossible, because chlorine was banned as an import. What happens to drinking water if it is not regularly purified? What bacterial diseases spread when water supplies become contaminated?

Iraqis bravely resisted the US invasion, and brought the troops of the marauding empire into defeat. So the US empire, just like the Roman empire of old, resorted to the tried-and-true tactic of divide and rule, inflaming sectarian divisions by rewarding political office on the basis of religious affiliation. The current Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was installed with US support, even though his political party has strong ideological ties to Iran. Maliki implemented the sectarian division of the country, worsening relations between Iraq’s ethnic and religious communities. Meanwhile, he did nothing to restore the once-functioning health and electricity systems that made Iraq a standout in the Arab world.

The Baghdad government is now tottering precipitously on the brink of total defeat, after its much-vaunted and American-sponsored army was routed by the Islamist guerrillas of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). While this is a stunning defeat for American (and British) foreign policy in Iraq, the ISIS guerrillas, buoyed by a burgeoning Sunni insurgency that began back in 2013, will only worsen the sectarian hatreds that are currently inflicting damage on the country. Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report correctly notes that the Islamist guerrillas, once financed by Washington, represent a growing threat not just to the American empire’s interests in the region, but also undermine the existence of a corporate-viable Iraqi state that can be subjugated to imperial dominance.

The invasion of Iraq was driven by deep capitalist interests intending on exploiting the vast mineral and economic resources of the Arab region. The plunder of Iraq, just like the devastation of Detroit, is designed to enrich a tiny financial minority class while the majority are left to struggle to their own devices. Margaret Kimberley points out in her article that;

Iraq was invaded with soldiers, guns and bombs. Detroit was invaded by the corporate “suits” who made a fast buck for themselves. The end result is the same for Michiganders and Iraqis alike. They end up suffering in a plundered society while other people make out like the bandits that they really are.

The Obama administration, while marketing itself as an anti-war government, has actually continued to expend resources on propping up and extending the imperial reach of the US empire, while impoverishing the American people at home. The demolition of viable societies in Iraq and Detroit are not the result of any innate human propensities, but rather the end result of a specific political programme to enrich a capitalist financial oligarchy at the expense of working people. As Kimberley explains in her essay:

…millions of Americans live an existence far from the myth of the great country. They are struggling to survive just like millions in the so-called third world. It is the gangsters who run the show in Baghdad and in Michigan too.